I've been having some trouble with a laptop where the system hangs when loading a Linux Live CD of any distro. This happens... right before KDE loads and the mouse will freeze to the middle of the screen and the system is just frozen there.

I tried to go into Windows PE and deleted the MBR there thinking it might be corrupted. I did a bootsect /nt60. Unfortunately, that worked. Now I get the missing MBR error immediately upon powering on and if a Linux Live CD is in the drive it bypasses that and proceeds to almost load to KDE, then freeze.

So, I can't get to terminal either.

Halp? :-)

Deleting an MBR was silly. But you know that now, don't you?
You need to reinstall lilo or grub - whichever you had. You only need a console, not a gui.
The freezes are most likely media errors causing problems. Carefully clean the cd & hope. Drop from dvd to cd for more reliability.

Thank you. How similar are console and terminal? Cause I can't get to either one...

Usually a terminal is a graphical application that runs under a GUI system, while a console is text only and runs without any form of GUI. If you have problems getting to a terminal a console may help you. Depending on the distro you use there are different ways to get a console when the GUI doesn't work. Some offer a text only option in the bootmenu, with others you have to specifiy which runlevel you want to use (you may also want to try to switch the video driver that is used).
Tell us which distro you use and what you wanted to accomplish in the first place (repair an installed Windows, install Linux, just test Linux, ...).

I'd have to say in that respect, that they are identical.

You can recover from this, we will need to know what distro you are using, and which partition(s) contain your operating systems (you might want your Windows partition some day...)

In the mean time, start here:

http://gr8idea.info/os/tutorials/linux/mbr.html

I usually refer to ćonsole'as what you can get outside of a gui, and terminal as what you get inside. Itś my post youŕe figuring. They both run bash. There are 6 consoles on most distros, you type startx in one and then you can open things like xterm, which give terminals that run bash. They are places you run a shell where you can run other stuff.

My point was that you don need a gui running to set up lilo or grub.